As Beverage-Smart Switch Turns Ten, New Growth and Digital Itch Triggers Thirst for Talent

To complete a sampling mission, you must be willing to sit for extended periods of time in the sampling vehicle and interact with anyone at any time.” Or so reads a recent employment ad for a “brand ambassador” position representing Muscle Milk — one of several energetic clients that have recently helped to fill the sails of St. Louis–based experiential marketing agency Switch.

While Switch employs close to 1,200 part-time marketing personnel in the field, it’s the creative agency’s employee hiring closer to home that perhaps best accents the middle-market company’s renewed growth.

The agency added 15 full-time employees over the past 10 months, bringing it to 130 employees — all of whom now reside inside the firm’s 100,000-square-foot St. Louis headquarters. The new hires have added some luster to the $42 million firm’s 10th anniversary year — and made its senior management reflect back on a stubborn growth path that weathered some daunting hurdles, including the economic downturn and Hurricane Katrina.

“We could have let more people go back in 2008, but our values include loyalty to our people, so we told ourselves that we just had to knuckle-down here. Slowly, the business started to pick up and clients began giving us more work,” explains Switch CEO Mike O’Neill, one of three executives who bought out Anheuser-Busch’s marketing arm — Busch Creative Services — back in 2002.

Having projected a 12 percent increase in sales in 2012, the agency should this year safely double the $23 million in revenue streams it acquired 10 years ago — another anniversary milestone for a firm that now appears eager to fine-tune its narrative and better illuminate the path ahead.

“People bring opportunities to us, and people create opportunities here because we give them a chance to do so, and then we leverage the heck out of them,” says Switch’s executive vice president, Kevin Quigley — who, along with O’Neill and Switch president John Nickel, was part of the original Anheuser-Busch “buyout trio” that went on to establish the firm as an independent agency.

It’s clear to Switch management that the firm — which often goes by the long-form moniker “Switch: Liberate Your Brand” — emerged from the downturn as a different entity that had finally and undeniably severed the long apron strings that so temptingly dangled from its one-time parent.

At the time of the buyout in 2002, Anheuser-Busch accounted for 78 percent of Switch’s annual revenue. Today, A-B accounts for only 17 percent of the revenue of Switch, whose client portfolio is more accented these days by a flurry of upstart beverages including 5-Hour Energy, Muscle Milk, and vitaminwater. Still, Switch’s management believes that the firm’s independence was in large part secured following periods of struggle.

One of those periods arrived back in 2005, when Anheuser-Busch canceled its annual sales convention when Hurricane Katrina shut down the convention’s host city of New Orleans

“While we always knew intellectually that we had to get more clients, it was at that moment we viscerally and emotionally understood that we needed to diversify,” says O’Neill, who took over new product development from Quigley as part of a larger restructuring of the young agency.

“I said, ‘This can’t be all that hard.’ And, well, I got a two-by-four in the head,” says O’Neill, who recalls experiencing a good deal of frustration from the outset.

“We began trying all sorts of things to diversify and get new clients — some of them worked, but many of them didn’t. And while we’ve always had the attitude of ‘Let’s try it!,’ the fact is that getting new business is really very hard,” says O’Neill, who along with Quigley and Nickel has become increasingly focused on the talent piece of a business that is today organized into three groupings: experiential marketing, digital, and design.

“Our growth is really being driven by what our clients are looking for. And it’s not really any one technology. In fact, it’s all technologies related to the Web, social media, kiosks, apps — and it’s being driven by how our clients want to connect with their customers,” explains Quigley, whose words underscore the firm’s growing appetite for digital talent, which has recently led its management to consider ways of enhancing the firm’s culture to help business ideas come forward — particularly, digitally based business ideas.

“For us, this is about creating an innovation stream within the company, so we’re creating a culture that brings ideas forward. This is possibly a way to transform our business and own innovation instead of having it be something we do as a service to a client,” explains Quigley, whose comments concerning Switch’s renewed growth seldom stray from the intersection of client demand and talent.

Adds O’Neill: “So much of what we do these days requires a digital component. It comes down to the philosophy that if we find someone we believe is very good, we hire them —and then find something for them to do.”

Photo Above: From left: Switch CEO Mike O’Neill, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, Switch Executive Vice President Kevin Quigley, and Switch President John Nickel.